Are new plays really the thing?

While news that Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre is to launch what’s being billed as the biggest playwrighting competition outside London with a total of £45,000 in prize money being given annually and the promise of productions in the theatre’s main house and studio for the winning entry and runner-up also on offer, and West End producer Sonia Friedman is currently engaged in a Channel 4 search called The Play’s The Thing to find a new play by a complete unknown and nurture it under the gaze of the television cameras to a West End production, playwright Mark Ravenhill has provocatively hit back at the British theatre’s now nearly fetishistic preoccupation with chasing the holy grail of new writing.

It hasn’t always been thus, not even in Ravenhill’s own short time as a writer: “When I first started working in theatre in the late 1980s, the new play was seen by us newcomers as the least exciting medium. Reinvention of the classics, with Declan Donnellan’s Cheek by Jowl leading the way, was the pinnacle of fashion, alongside the physical theatre of Complicite and DV8,” he wrote in The Guardian this week.

Then things changed. “It was only later, in the middle of the 1990s, that a new generation of playwrights (I came late to the party) made the written play seem to have exciting possibilities again. But that was 10 years ago.”

And he gets to the nub of the problem: “Not every year throws up an exciting batch of new plays. Artistic directors of theatres now feel they can only be fully ‘moral’ if they’re producing new plays. So, some rather dodgy plays get produced. And audiences have some rather indifferent evenings”.

Of course, the problem is particularly acute for theatres who specialise in new writing. Whatever their procedures might be for searching out new plays and new writers, and nurturing and developing them if and when they find them, the realistic truth of it is that there just aren’t that many great new plays around. And competition to find them is fierce: in London alone we have the Royal Court, Bush, Hampstead and Soho all almost exclusively chasing new work, with fashionable theatres like the National, Almeida and Donmar also in on the parlour game.

When Max Stafford-Clark ran the Royal Court, he would regularly put on lots of plays that were not quite equal to his masterful gifts as probably the best director of new plays in the country, but made them always look better than they were. Now that he runs his own touring outfit, Out of Joint, the pressure on him isn’t so great to keep finding them; he only needs to do one or two a year now.

But revealingly, too, he mixes and matches – though new plays continue to dominate, his production of Macbeth – so vital and alive that it made it feel like a new play – was one of the best productions of Shakespeare of last year. And Ravenhill, whose Shopping and Fucking was directed by Stafford-Clark, notes, “There are huge dangers in cutting ourselves from the historical continuum that the ‘canon’ offers. I can forsee a not too distant future where, apart from the major Shakespeare plays (which seem indestructible), we have a theatre of new work. This would be a bad theatre.”

Instead of widening the ‘canon’ to old plays from different cultures and different backgrounds, he notes that “we seem to have narrowed the range of work we produce in our theatres, until we’re trapped in an eternal present.” But, he adds, “the great thing about a really good play from another time, another place, is that it allows us – directors, actors, audiences – to think and feel differently. And an audience that can do this is actually the audience we playwrights would like, too.”

Thus he concludes, it’s time for a shake-up – “for a new wave of energy in our theatre”; and it’ll come, he suggests, not just from new work or just from the classics. “The best actors and directors have always worked in both. They present different challenges. It’s only by having a theatre culture that continues to explore and expand our relationship with the past, as well as presenting the best of the present, that we’ll have a theatre that is fully alive.”